- It’s Day 10…of the…shut…down…I might just skip this section one day. Why and how this still continues to exist is beyond me. $2.9 billion and counting are the amount of money lost in this shutdown so far.

- “According to a New York Times report this evening, President Obama told House Democrats tonight that Republicans are demanding everything up to his presidency in order to end the government shutdown and raise the debt ceiling.” Salon has more.

31 Responses
to “The Roundup for October 10th, 2013”

“The Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf, Algeria, are a collection of refugee camps, set up in the Tindouf Province, Algeria in 1975-76 for Sahrawi refugees fleeing from Moroccan forces, who advanced through Western Sahara during the Western Sahara War. With most refugees still living in the camps, the refugee situation is among the most protracted ones worldwide.”

The Tindouf area is located on the hammada, a vast desert plain of the Sahara Desert. Summer temperatures in this part of the hammada, historically known as “The Devil’s Garden”, are often above 50°C and frequent sand storms disrupt normal life. There is little or no vegetation, and firewood has to be gathered by car tens of kilometers away. Only a few of the camps have access to water, and the drinking sources are neither clean nor sufficient for the entire refugee population. Basic life cannot be sustained in this environment, and the camps are completely dependent on foreign aid.”

The international community has all but forgotten these men, women, and children who fled their homes in the mid-’70s because of fighting between the Moroccan military and the Polisario Front,

The refugees remain trapped to this day in refugee camps in a remote part of the Sahara often referred to as “The Devil’s Garden.”

The company that operated a fertilizer plant in the city of West, where an April explosion killed 15 people, faces $118,300 in federal fines for two dozen serious safety violations, including a failure to have an emergency response plan …

“The President is uncomfortable defending this [NSA lawlessness]. Maybe he spends too much time reading blogs on the left,” [Former NSA Counsel and current apologist] Stewart Baker said. “That’s fatal in cases like this. You have to make the case because nobody else will.”

There’s one difference, and it matters. In the McCarthy era ( and I’m old enough to remember it) if you got named you lost your job. The fear amplified the work of HUAC and its many state clones. What we have here is pure state repression of dissent. Bad as it is, it doesn’t have popular support. The situation is becoming more like Eastern Europe in the late Soviet period. Stable on the surface, but unsustainable. Dissenters are the new Gays. Just about everyone has someone they know or a family member who is one. Makes them harder to demonize. I’m not saying things can’t or won’t get a lot worse, but I thnk the odds of a Terror State are still low.

I appreciate the distinction you’re drawing, Knut. I wonder if you might explain more about your contention that this ‘doesn’t have popular support’, and what you mean by a ‘Terror State’.

If you read the piece, you will have seen that two of the women who wouldn’t name names or identities were eventually put into solitary confinement, and the Koch man’s condition is hard to determine for lack of information.

It was eye-opening for me to realize how few rights a person has after being subpoenaed to testify before a grand jury, including no Fifth Amendment rights, of course.

Seriously, I’m going to submit it Counterpunch and Dissidentvoice.org for publication.

Trends and events like these are far too hidden for the public to know, much less fight, imo.

Large amounts of fallout disseminated worldwide from the meltdowns in four reactors at the Fukushima-Dai-ichi plant in Japan beginning March 11, 2011 included radioiodine isotopes. Just days after the meltdowns, I-131 concentrations in US precipitation was measured up to 211 times above normal. Highest levels of I-131 and airborne gross beta were documented in the five US States on the Pacific Ocean.

. The number of congenital hypothyroid cases in these five states from March 17-December 31, 2011 was 16% greater than for the same period in 2010, compared to a 3% decline in 36 other US States

To make a long story short, a default and/or missed SS and Medicare payments are the last thing we need to worry about in this crisis. Long-term benefit cuts, however, are a very real imminent danger, as are the other 14 dangers mentioned in that article.

I am not certain that it does or does not have popular support, Knut, given that, very likely, very few people actually know about it.

At least, during the McCarthy era, of which I am just old enough to remember the tail-end, and the discussions my father and his friends had about the hearings and the chilling effects of McCarthy and his many “helpers” had on thought and the expression of those thoughts. McCarthy WANTED publicity, while FBI hopes this may fly sufficiently below the radar (helped by today’s political class media, no doubt, to escape the notice of the public, at least until such a time as it is so well established that no one will dare question it.

Great point, DW. I’m trying to get my mind around ‘losing one’s job automatically if named’ can begin to equate with Matt Duran and Katherine Olejnik not only being jailed, but spending time in solitary confinement. Barbaric.

No contest for me, at any rate.

Yes, these ugly three hop persecutions and fishing expeditions by grand jury are about ‘communities of activism or dissent’ intimidation. The author referenced Will Potter’s ‘Green is the new red’ and Fibbie training manual.

If the Fibbies get the names, they can dip into the NSA communications data at will, of course.

A Terror State is what you see with the FBI and Grand Juries writ large. The government rules by sheer terror. Best example is the Stalinist State and the last 15 months of the Hitler regime. Obviously there are softer varieties of same, like Pinochet and Franco, but there remained islands of quasi-independence –i.e., the business community and the church. I suppose totalitarian state is probably the more common term, but I like to think of it as Terror, because that it what gets people to obey.

Very brave folks. The more support they get the harder it becomes in the future to keep persecuting people like them. Bradley Manning paid a huge price, but it paid off for Snowden in international public opinion. What is necessary is to publicize the persecution, and not let it, as DW says, sail below the radar.

We all know, and wish it weren’t true, that freedom isn’t free. Some people have to sacrifice; we just don’t know who, and it might at some point just be one of us. It’s natural to want to free ride on the sacrifices of others. If I had to condemn my generation, that is it.

Again, very well said, and I agree with your assessment, Knut, of our generation, for whom money and the comfortable toleration of the intolerable has become far more important than freedom or even life, itself. If any generation has selfishly hastened human beings toward extinction, it is our own.

We should remember, though, that there was a selection process within the “Baby Boomer” generation implemented by the rulers of the so-called “Greatest Generation” that came before it–the architects of the Cold War. That selection process was the Vietnam War and its long-term effects and aftermath, which primarily victimized those in the Armed Forces, but whose destructive waves spread far beyond, shocking and shattering the faith in the justice and goodness of society of tens of millions more, and through the sorrow and disillusionment they sowed, ultimately derailing their lives in the short or long term. Those among the Baby Boomer generation who have assumed leadership (and are at last slipping toward retirement) are, for the most part, the more selfish and callous among our generation.

Those among the Baby Boomer generation who have assumed leadership (and are at last slipping toward retirement) are, for the most part, the more selfish and callous among our generation.

Anecdotally, it certainly seems that way, doesn’t it (speaking as a hippie boomer)?

I never trusted Clinton, although he did, for one very brief moment, seem the antithesis to that… alas both Bubba & Hills fall into the selfish, callous category of boomers, don’t they? Just like W & his frat-rat ilk.

Yes, and thank you, Knut. Norman Pollack often uses the phrase ‘sliding into fascism’ as a non-hyperbolic way to describe our present state; others disagree, and call it ‘full-blown’.

But I’ll send the Alternet piece to both websites I mentioned.

And today on Democracy Now is ‘Report Finds Police Worldwide Criminalize Dissent, Assert New Powers in Crackdown on Protests’. Anthony Romero advocates lawsuits against entities that trash our human rights. It’s a good idea, but that is a long way around Dobbin’s barn. ;~)

It’s 42 minutes, and I haven’t listened to all of it, but it promises to be good.

No, freedom isn’t free, and it bothers me that in my comfort zone, all I can do is clack my keys. Mr. wd and I don’t even Occupy Mancos, CO any longer. ;~)

I agree, caleb36, yet, the very first thing after the complete exhaustion of standing against the Vietnam war… was, that among many of the “weekend warriors”, portfolios became the main concern … social awareness took very much a back seat to “doing well” … most everybody heaved a collective sigh of relief and assumed that the larger war of consciousness was “won” … and, by then politics was so tiresome that everybody looked the other way … at least that is how I remember it.

Pretty much the way I remember it, too. But then again, all the protests ag the VN War happened mainly bc of the draft, if you’ll recall. I doubt seriously we’d have had the same kinds of protests if the Military had been all volunteer, and the PTB learned that lesson quick-smart.

Most of the “radicals” that I knew in my youth were more than happy to become capitalists once they didn’t have to worry about being possibly killed in the jungles of Viet Nam.

Really it was only a very small minority of boomers who were truly political – whether right or left wing – back in the day. The rest was mainly about the draft, plus some uptick on women’s rights, which seems to have also faded into the mists of the past.

the small minority truly aware about and interested in and active with politics over the long haul remains just that: a small minority.

the rightwing is more powerful bc most of the 1% are rightwing and have funded and supported the various rightwing organizations, churches, tea party bc it was a means to their ends… and a way of “managing” a certain portion of the proles.

the left hasn’t truly existed for quite some time. between McCarthy & other forces from Nixon on down… not so much.